Schedule 2022

8:00 - Registration Opens / Visit Sponsors / Light Breakfast

9:00 to 9:40

Anderson Student Center (ASC) A

Discussion provides an overview of how the US Government pivoted from legacy development to embracing modern approaches, innovative methodologies, Human-Centered Design, Agile, DevSecOps and Open Source to disrupt decades of bureaucracy. History of United States Digital Services, 18F, Air Force Software Factories (Kessel Run), and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) as examples of this evolution and its promising future.

Mr. Cairns is responsible for corporate Business Development and Capture for federal and commercial sectors including DHS, DoD, Intel, VA, HHS, USDA, HUD, and Commerce. At Softrams, Ventera and ICF, he served as Business Development and Capture Executive focusing on IT Modernization and Digital Transformation initiatives. At Leidos, he worked with the Homeland Security Solutions Business Unit (HSS) and identified, developed, pursued and captured new and existing opportunities at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) including CBP, USCIS, ICE, CWMD, FEMA, TSA, USSS, NPPD, and DHS HQ. Prior to Leidos, Mr. Cairns served as a Director and Partner at True North Equities LLC. At True North Equities he supported the acquisition, development and growth of small to mid-size companies. Prior to True North Equities LLC, Mr. Cairns was Business Development Manager for SAIC’s Homeland and Civilian Solutions Business Unit. Commissioned with the role of expanding SAIC’s presence in the global Homeland Security and Intelligence spaces, he consulted across the corporation to identify, develop, pursue and win international, federal, state and local opportunities. He also served as the U.S. corporate lead for the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Integrated Account. Prior to SAIC, he served as an Associate Partner and Homeland Security Liaison with IBM’s Business Consulting Services. Mr. Cairns worked to bring IBM solutions to the Homeland Security space through efforts to identify institutional development challenges, optimize core mission functions, and recognize emerging technologies, processes, and methods that support Homeland Security efforts worldwide. Prior to IBM, Mr. Cairns was appointed Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations for the United States Department of Homeland Security in November of 2003 by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. As Deputy Chief of Staff, Mr. Cairns was a member of the senior management team overseeing the largest Federal government merger in the last 50 years. In addition to assisting in the complex consolidation of 22 agencies and 180,000 employees, he supervised the Immediate Office of the Secretary’s daily operations, managing a $17 million budget, DHS personnel, information technology, security, and facilities. He also managed all domestic and global activities for the Secretary and Deputy Secretary through the Office of Scheduling and Advance. Prior to his appointment as Deputy Chief of Staff, Mr. Cairns served as Secretary Ridge’s Personal Assistant. In this capacity, he traveled extensively with the Secretary, coordinating his daily schedule and serving as his primary liaison to Homeland Security staff, the White House, and other government agencies. From January 2002 through March 2003, Mr. Cairns served at the White House in the Executive Office of the President as President Bush’s Director of Presidential Writers. There he coordinated the development and production of policy statements, proclamations, letters, and other documents communicating the positions and initiatives of the Bush Administration Before moving to Washington, DC, Mr. Cairns worked for Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, holding several positions including Deputy Secretary for Administration, Department of Community and Economic Development. As Deputy Secretary, he was involved in community and economic developments projects throughout Pennsylvania and around the world. A native of Waterford, Pennsylvania, Mr. Cairns received bachelor’s degrees in English Literature and World Literature from Pennsylvania State University. He also earned a M.A. in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University.

Anderson Student Center (ASC) B

Talk level: intermediate
Decomposing existing monolithic applications into microservices or other migration / hybrid application transitions requires a balancing act between moving efficiently and keeping existing services online. Strangler Fig is the most common pattern used for migrations of these types. See how to successfully implement Strangler Fig in an example monolithic to microservices application rewrite.

Keith is an integration engineer working with all things streaming especially Apache Kafka, most recently at the data in motion company Confluent, founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka.

Anderson Student Center (ASC) C

Application network security is of utmost importance for many companies around the globe. With cyber perils on the rise we’ll talk about what it means to improve security for data in flight with a zero trust networking architecture. Using technologies such as Envoy, Istio and eBPF we will dive into methods to help secure, observe and proactively prevent the potential compromise of data in flight.

Nick is a Field Engineer at Solo.io who has a deep background in Kubernetes and Automation. Previously he was a Principal Specialist Solution Architect at Red Hat with a focus on OpenShift and Kubernetes helping enterprises around the world improve their efficiency through innovation. His industry experience spans over 20 years and he brings that insight into everything he does.

Anderson Student Center (ASC) Scooters

One of the features added in C# 9 is called "source generators", enabling a developer to create new code at compile time. This can be used for a myriad of cases, such as optimization, automating repetitive code, and dynamic API creation. In this session, I'll cover how source generators work and demonstrate a number of implementations.

Jason Bock is a Developer Advocate at Rocket Mortgage and a Microsoft MVP (C#). He has over 25 years of experience working on several business applications using a diverse set of frameworks and languages. He is the author of ".NET Development Using the Compiler API", "Metaprogramming in .NET", and "Applied .NET Attributes". He has written numerous articles on software development issues and has presented at a number of conferences and user groups. He is a leader of the [Twin Cities Code Camp](https://twincitiescodecamp.com/). Jason holds a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Marquette University. Feel free to [visit his web site](http://www.jasonbock.net).

Iverson Center for Faith (ICF) A

In this presentation, you will learn the fundamental skills to take the next step in developing high-quality data engineering software through automated testing. These concepts apply broadly to data engineering, and isn't just for PySpark developers. Many data engineers don't have the time, knowledge, or patience to build automated tests for their Spark pipelines. This talk will start with organizing your code, then walk through the test-driven development process and apply it to data engineering tasks like building verifiably high-quality DataFrame transformations. If there's time, the talk will then demonstrate how to translate the TDDE concepts to building AWS Glue pipelines with PySpark.

If there's two things people know about Donald as absolute fact: He loves hockey and really loves software testing. He has been in the field of software engineering for over two decades, covering retail, finance, energy, and medical devices, and is currently the Director of Data Engineering at Improving MN. He has spent most of the last decade applying software engineering principles to the fields of data science and engineering, with focuses on automated testing and Agile processes. He built and taught a class at the University of MN called, "Big Data Engineering and Architecture," as part of the Data Science Master's program. He enjoys sharing his knowledge and you'll find him giving talks about topics like observability, test-driven data engineering, or any new technology he's learned. His hobbies include playing video games with his wife and daughters, solving various Rubik's cubes, playing hockey, running, and losing golf balls.

Iverson Center for Faith (ICF) B

Infrastructure as Code comes in many flavors, and the Azure Cloud's default deployment templates work with Azure Resource Manager (ARM) to define and deploy infrastructure. Working with the JSON format of ARM can be challenging, but Microsoft has introduced a language processor called Bicep which generates ARM as output. At the same time there are other options, including scripting tools, Terraform, Pulumi, Ansible and others. In this session we'll compare creating infrastructure using ARM, Terraform and Bicep, and compare pros and cons to each.

A software architect, Azure expert, and former Microsoft evangelist, Mike Benkovich dedicates huge amounts of his time to helping his fellow developers and burgeoning programmers learn about new technologies and platforms. Mike’s website equips developers with tips and resources to help them get to grips with technologies including cloud, data and devices, and he produces online courses covering areas like Azure enterprise development, DevOps and serverless computing.

Iverson Center for Faith (ICF) C

What would your team do if they knew with absolute certainty there was something more productive to be working on? The giants of software are outpacing the competition with the leadership and decision-making skills of their whole teams. Almost everyone else is getting in the way of their own all-stars and hoping agile will save them. How do you win when problems are complex and all the easy jobs are taken? Let your teams lead themselves.

Tom Mahle builds software with React and React Native and leads teams to actualize on their potential. This has driven his tech teams to the tip of the spear in driving feedback-seeking, proactive development of everything from bleeding edge development tools and scrappy side projects to enterprise solutions.

10:00 to 10:40

Anderson Student Center (ASC) A

Almost every organization has initiatives that promote Women in Technology, and DEI broadly. Over the course of her career, Meena has had the pleasure of both participating in and leading these initiatives. She also has decades of lived experience as a woman trying to succeed in technology, who has benefited from the advocacy and counsel of allies along the way. In this talk, she reflects on her personal observations about allyship and some effective tips for those seeking to advance women in technology.

Meena Jambulingam is a technology leader with more than two decades of experience in retail, eCommerce, and healthcare. She’s had the opportunity to shape enterprise strategies, drive technology transformation, and deliver highly scalable data platforms for large organizations along the way. Meena is passionate about building diverse teams and giving back to the tech community wherever she can. At Chewy, she is an active member of the Women’s Advancement and Advocacy Group, a Team Member Resource Group for Women and Allies. Meena shares her home with her husband, two rescue dogs, and two rescue cats.

Anderson Student Center (ASC) B

Avoid CICD vendor lock-in by leveraging multi-stage Docker builds and GitOps with ArgoCD, Azure Arc (Flux) and GCP Anthos. We will compare Cloud SaaS and OSS options for GitOps CD, demonstrate multi-cloud deployments and moving CI logic from CI systems into container builds.

Isaac is a Principal Architect/Engineer at WellSky with a focus on Home Hospice. In recent years, he's been a Principal SRE at CHRobinson and Medtronic. Isaac has a 20+ year background in SCM and DevOps and in more recent years Cloud and SRE Architecture. He lives in Woodbury and loves camping with his kids.

Anderson Student Center (ASC) C

We will show how businesses are adopting verifiable credentials, decentralized orchestration and blockchain identity to reduce fraud, increase privacy and improve user experience. Our real-world examples of production ready solutions are already being used by one state’s Department of Education as well as other public sector organizations. Learn how biometrics, proofing, KYC and other MFA services link with verifiable credentials through decentralized orchestration. See how paper-based documents are being replaced with verifiable credentials that reduce cost, increase security and privacy preservation. We will also demonstrate how Ping Identity and other sources can issue and verify blockchain based verifiable credentials.

Mike has created several companies that provide transformational digital solutions for the global enterprise. He has developed award-winning products in unified communications, service operations, security, identity, and data management. Mike has deployed complex identity integrations with some of the world's largest organizations. His latest product, IdRamp, provides a decentralized ID platform focused on orchestration, password elimination, verifiable credentials, blockchain ID, and service delivery.
Sam Curren is Indicio’s Senior Systems Architect and works on both open source and customer projects. He has been involved in the Identity Community for over 12 years, working and researching on personal data, distributed systems, supply chain digital birth certificates, and Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs). He is a co-chair of both the Hyperledger Aries project and the DIF DIDComm Working Group, and is also a member of the Decentralized Identity Foundation Steering Committee. Sam has a Masters Degree in Computer Science from Brigham Young University.

Anderson Student Center (ASC) Scooters

We’ve all heard them. Things like “It’s just a form” and “It shouldn’t take that long to add a few buttons”. Sometimes we hear them from our peers and stakeholders, and other times we hear them from ourselves. Why are these assumptions so common and what makes Front-End so unassuming? We’ll explore a few common scenarios and identify what makes Front-End applications complex, how to spot these complexities, and why bad assumptions are all too common.

Eric has been a Front-End technologist for over 11 years. His passion is solving complex technology problems with elegant, scalable, and accessible solutions through code, architecture, and leadership. At Nerdery, he directs the strategy, growth, and health of the Front-End domain as well as providing consultation and direct solutions for the ever changing and growing business problems of our clients.

Iverson Center for Faith (ICF) A

Your program might be easy for **you** to use, but can someone else use it just as easily? If we want people to use open source software, it has to be easy to learn and easy to use, or people will not use it. In this session, we'll learn about *usability testing* - what it is, why it's important, and how to do it. You don't need a "usability lab" to do usability testing - you don't even need to be in the same room. You can learn a lot just by watching five people use the software to do a set of tasks. We'll walk through all the steps to do your own usability test and how to understand the results so you can make your software even better.

Jim Hall is an open source software developer and advocate. His first contribution to open source was in 1993, with a patch to GNU Emacs. Since then, Jim has authored, contributed to, or maintained dozens of open source projects. In addition to writing open source software, Jim also works with usability testing in open source software. Major projects include: FreeDOS and GNOME Jim often speaks about open source software, including the Teaching Open Source in University Systems Symposium, FOSDEM, Kieler Open Source und Linux Tage, State of the Source, SeaGL - in addiiton to webinars and podcasts. Jim is also a featured speaker on IT Leadership and Technology Innovation at conferences including Government IT Symposium, SINC Midwest IT Forum, International Institute of Business Analysis, Premier CIO Forum, Minnesota e-Learning Summit, CIC CIO TechForum, and UBTech. Jim is a frequent contributing writer on open source software to publications including OpenSource.com, CloudSavvy IT, Linux Journal, TechRound, Linux.UK, Linux Magazine, Linux Voice, and FOSS Force Magazine. Jim is also a published author on IT Leadership, and is the author of Coaching Buttons, a collection of essays about leadership and vision in information technology: how to be a leader, how to lead through change, how to do strategic planning. Jim has also contributed chapters to several other books on Open Organizations and IT Leadership, including The Open Organization Leaders Manual (2nd Edition), The Open Organization Workbook, and Cultivating Change in the Academy. He is currently writing his next book, about programming, due in Fall 2021. Jim has a master's degree in Scientific and Technical Communication from the University of Minnesota, and a bachelor's degree in Physics from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls.

Iverson Center for Faith (ICF) B

Users don’t see your distributed services, cloud architecture, or instrumentation—they only see how the web app is working. Understanding their experience in the client-side is the first step towards understanding the rest of the system. We’ll explore how to make your client-side applications more observable through error tracking, web performance, and usage analytics. With better understanding of real-user experience, you’ll better understand the real behavior of your systems.

Todd Gardner is a software entrepreneur who has built multiple profitable products. He believes that old technology is often better than new, advocating for simple design and balancing complexity with risk. He is the cofounder of TrackJS and Request Metrics, where he helps thousands of developers build faster and more reliable websites. He also hosts PubConf variety show and the Script&Style podcast.

Iverson Center for Faith (ICF) C

Last December, many of us were forced to contend with the Log4Shell vulnerability and rushed to get our systems patched to protect against this zero-day exploit. While this particular vulnerability may be patched satisfactorily by now, our current technology landscape means these incidents will continue to happen over and over again. We may not be able to predict exactly when they'll occur but we can take steps to be more prepared to handle them when they do show up. Join us for an open discussion about how Log4Shell-type events impact technology teams logistically and strategically. Our panel will feature consultants with experience in development, project delivery, product strategy and architecture. We've seen these events play out in companies across the state and want to share what we've learned.
We'll cover questions like
- How can developers move quickly without moving recklessly?
- How should the response differ based on the company's size and product?
- How can product/project delivery teams protect customers and support developers?
- How do solution architects handle the feeling that you should re-evaluate everything?
- Is it a good thing for your CEO to know the name of your low-level logging framework?
Stop by to listen in or bring your own questions for us to discuss

Solution Design Group is a team of collaborators, creators, and thinkers who partner with companies to accelerate growth. Elle will be leading a panel discussion. The panelists include Brien Coffield, Jessica Herdegen, Sarah Rochford, and Paul Wiedel from Solution Design Group. The panel is comprised of technologists with decades of experience in development, project delivery, product strategy and architecture.

11:00 to 11:40

Anderson Student Center (ASC) A

Xcel Energy provides service to millions of customers across the Midwest and Western United States. Xcel is also one of the leaders in clean energy production with a goal of being 100% carbon free by 2050. Historically, Xcel Energy has not been known as a leader in IT innovation...that is changing and it's changing FAST! Please join Andy and Mike Pereira as they talk about the adventure of building digital capabilities within the utility landscape.

Andy is currently the Director of Platform Engineering at Xcel Energy. Over his 15+ years in the industry, Andy has done everything from testing CAT5 cables to building cloud organizations within controlled industry. In his current role at Xcel Energy, Andy has been focused on transforming the way in which infrastructure and data services are delivered to internal customers.
Mike Pereira is an Operations Lead in the Digital Operations Factory at Xcel Energy. While covering diverse responsibilities for the Factory, Mike really enjoys the challenge of building empowered teams that are transforming Xcel Energy from the inside out. He’s inspired by Xcel’s commitment to a carbon free future and the transformative opportunities required to get there. Mike loves reciting daily dad jokes to his 9 year old daughter, cooking New York Times recipes, and the fresh air and fresher views while mountain biking.

Anderson Student Center (ASC) B

Real-Time processing is becoming a requirement in all analytic verticals as businesses need to react to results immediately. However, sometimes the move from batch to real-time can leave you in a pinch. How do you reprocess/correct mistakes in your data? How do you migrate a new system to real-time that has historical data to bring along with them? Migrating from batch to real-time in Apache Druid doesn't mean you forget about batch.

We'll start with how to run Apache Druid locally with your containerized based development environment. We will load data from files and as well as from real-time streaming with Apache Kafka.

Take Aways:

* How to run Apache Druid and Apache Kafka locally

* Druid Ingestion in batch and real-time

* Query the data using Druid SQL Console and Apache Superset

* Configure Apache Druid Real-Time Ingestion to make it safe to reload historical segments

Neil Buesing is an active speaker presenting on open-source technologies at Apache Kafka Summit, Apache Druid Summit, and a variety of meetups. He is also an active member of the Apache Kafka Summit Program Committee. He enjoys working with clients to help with their streaming and analytic needs.

Anderson Student Center (ASC) C

The trials and tribulations of taking an open source project, Wine, from a very cool concept with practical application to a worldwide phenomenon, Proton, in 26 short years. The presentation focuses on the many milestones achieved in building Wine to the point where it will be the software foundation for the pending gaming platform, Steam Deck (from Valve), in 2022. In doing so, the presentation discusses how projects can successfully collaborate with commercial enterprise to form and deliver better solutions.

James B. Ramey is the current President of CodeWeavers, Inc. For the past 15 years, Mr. Ramey has been working with software developers around the world in porting their applications and games to both the macOS and Linux platforms using the open source project - Wine. Throughout his many experiences, Mr. Ramey has had a front row seat to dozens of partnerships between private and open source projects and can speak to best practices for successful collaborations. When not in the office, James B. Ramey can be found at home in Bloomington with his wife, Angela, their daughter, Grace, and two rescue dogs, Shelby and Charlie. Mr. Ramey is a graduate of Moorhead State University and earned his MBA from the University of Phoenix.

Anderson Student Center (ASC) Scooters

Much like a new puppy, the challenges of micro frontend architecture aren’t always obvious until you’ve adopted it. Your dreams of aligning frontend code ownership with team structure have been realized, and it fills your heart with joy. However, UI components have become more difficult to share between teams, presenting a challenge when you want the same widget to appear throughout the product.

In this talk, we’ll introduce you to Module Federation, a promising new feature of Webpack 5 that can make sharing UI components much easier. We’ll cover the benefits, limitations and gotchas of implementing this solution in an enterprise setting, helping you determine where and how Module Federation can be useful in your organization.

Mike has over 10 years of experience developing software and web applications. He specializes in building and architecting robust, enterprise-level user interfaces. Currently at Code42, he is on the UI development team and is focused on building a micro frontend web application that is easily maintained by all of Code42’s microservice teams. Mike is a huge React fan and is passionate about writing lean, functional, and testable code.
Caitlin is a software developer at Code42, where she builds interesting things, asks a lot of questions, and learns from smart people. She loves well-written error messages, building products that people enjoy using, and finding ways to make development more efficient for teams.

Iverson Center for Faith (ICF) A

For the most flexible, powerful stream processing engines, it seems like the barrier to entry has never been higher than it is now. If you’ve tried, or have been interested in leveraging the strengths of real-time data processing - maybe for machine learning, IoT, anomaly detection or data analysis - but you’ve been held back: I’ve been there, and it’s frustrating. And that’s why this talk is for you.

That being said, this talk is also for you if you ARE experienced with stream processing but you want an easy (and if I say so myself, pretty fun) way to add some of the newest, bleeding edge features to your toolbelt.

This session will be about getting started with Flink SQL. Apache Flink’s high level SQL language has the familiarity of the SQL you know and love (or at least, know…), but with some powerful new functionality, and of course, the benefit of being able to be used with Flink and PyFlink.

More specifically, this will be a pragmatic entry into creating data pipelines with Flink SQL, as well as a sneak peek into some of its newest and most interesting features.

Caito is a Software-Engineer-turned-Developer-Advocate. She represents the US region for Ververica, creators of Apache Flink (a stream processing engine). Her engineering background is in stream processing and data analytics/observability. Outside of tech, she loves running, dance, woodworking, and terrible puns.

Iverson Center for Faith (ICF) B

You have probably heard of SVGs but haven't taken the dive and hand-coded them. Let's unlock inline SVG's power and change that. A codepen account is encouraged if you'd like to code-along.

I love math, art, broomball, and creating interactive websites. I also enjoy creating coding side projects. To my surprise one was viral hit – spiralbetty.com – with more than 70M video views on TikTok (tiktok.com/tag/spiralbetty).

Iverson Center for Faith (ICF) C

Every year, HR managers say that Open Source talent is important to them, but also say they have trouble finding qualified help. Public education is doing next to nothing to meet this need. We're trying to change that.

Our presentation demonstrates the effectiveness benefits and effectiveness of bringing Open Source software into K-12 education through school based Linux clubs. The award-winning Aspen Academy Penguin Corps uses Linux and Open Source software to rejuvenate old computers, which are then used by students who need them. This closed our school's Digital Divide.

We'll explain how our school solved its COVID-19 induced digital equity problems through the use of Open Source software and recycled computers, ultimately providing over 300 computers for students for less than $7,000. From there, we'll talk about how we've used open source to provide computers for our classrooms, for a pilot 1:1 program, and how we'll use Open Source to create exciting new learning opportunities in the next school year. We will also teach about how YOU can get involved in bringing today's students into the Open Source community.

Come hear from Stu Keroff and a team of Penguin Corps students. Bring your questions and be ready to be inspired!

Stu Keroff is a technology integrationist at Aspen Academy in Savage. He has spent the last 10 years using Linux and open source software to close the Digital Divide for Minnesota students. He is the founder of the first two middle school Linux clubs in Minnesota: the Community School of Excellence Asian Penguins and the Aspen Academy Penguin Corps. He has spoken at several education and technology conferences, has written several articles on school-based Linux clubs, and is the author of “The Linux Club Guide” at www.linuxclubguide.com

11:40 to 1:00 - Lunch / Visit Sponsors

1:00 to 1:40

Anderson Student Center (ASC) A

Best Buy's amazing fulfillment capabilities are now being brought to other retailers, such as Amazon, Samsung, Instacart and others. It is being powered by APIs available for others to use. This presentation is sharing what we do, how we do it, and how it might inspire you to think about what's possible.

Brent has been part of Best Buy's evolution to become the leading omnichannel retailer in the United States. With BestBuy.com (and other digital channels), over 40% of orders are fulfilled by Store Pickup. Best Buy also leverages nearby available inventory to give a customer a personalized promise date for delivery.

Anderson Student Center (ASC) B

Vela is a fast, lightweight and scalable CI/CD platform built on Linux container technology written in Golang.

Learn about the journey Vela underwent from an internal project at Target to an open source offering ran by multiple companies!

Some topics covered include why we built Vela, challenges with open source and the future outlook of the project.

A small demo will be showcased with some of the most loved features Vela has to offer.

Jordan is a lead engineer working on the cloud platform at Cargill. In this role, Jordan manages many of the enterprise CI/CD tools and cloud provider integrations. When not working, Jordan enjoys spending time skiing, sailing, and reading the latest science fiction series.
David is a lead engineer on a team that manages a few engineering enablement tools, including CI/CD, at Target. In his free time, David loves playing board (and video) games.

Anderson Student Center (ASC) C

One of the most effective ways to promote any Open-Source project is to build a tightly-knit community of developers that know and trust each other. We have found that using a combination of microsites, blogging, and analytics are great ways to build trusting communities. This talk will describe our experiences building a community around Open-Source MicroPython development. We’ll explain the various process we have built around Medium.com, LinkedIn, GitHub, and GitHub Pages and show some of the ways you can create and build communities using these tools. We will also show how these tools provide statistics and metrics that give you feedback on how your community is growing and how to encourage and promote leaders in your community.

Dan McCreary is a Distinguished Engineer working for the Optum Advanced Technology Collaborative. He helps businesses within UnitedHealth Group (Fortune 6) evaluate advanced technologies including AI, Graph and NoSQL. Dan has a background in solution architecture, search, machine learning, and NLP. He is the co-author of the book “Making Sense of NoSQL” and was the co-founder of the Dataversity NoSQL Now! Series of conferences. His current research is helping organizations evaluate the cost-effectiveness of migrating from relational to graph databases. In the past, Dan worked for Steve Jobs as NeXT computer and Bell Labs as an integrated circuit designer.

Anderson Student Center (ASC) Scooters

Let's do something just for the fun of it!

Sonic Pi is a code-based music creation and performance tool - let's dig into this together! No Sonic Pi or musical experience needed, but it might be helpful to have some coding experience (or knowledge) and a passion for music!

We'll learn how to spin up the program, what options are available, how to use them, and then jam out for a bit :)

Download Sonic Pi here if you'd like to code along: https://sonic-pi.net/

Casie is a software developer based in Minneapolis and is passionate about making the Twin Cities and Midwest tech community more diverse and accessible to all. She is also interested in communication, the meanings and motivations behind what we say, and how all that can bring us together (or, push us apart).

Iverson Center for Faith (ICF) A

C.H. Robinson's role as one of the world's largest logistics companies has been disrupted by companies with strong digital platforms. However, this competitive pressure has set off a digital transformation in how decisions are made in pricing, freight matching, and overall supply chain execution throughout the business, with a renewed focus on bolstering digital connectivity with our customers and carriers. In this talk, we’ll walk through a few ways data science has been empowering people to make data-driven decisions and how this is evolving the legacy business processes at C.H. Robinson, which, in turn, is pushing our underlying technology platform and how our customers interact with us.

Alex is a Director of Data Science at C.H. Robinson. He loves being at the bleeding edge of disruptive innovation. At C.H. Robinson, his team has been tasked to use machine learning coupled to a cutting edge technology stack built on top of our troves of supply chain data to provide retrospective and predictive insights for our customers. In his free time, he loves to wonder if microservices in the cloud are truly the way of the future as he burns through his company's Snowflake credits.

Iverson Center for Faith (ICF) B

As data applications move from file and database solutions to streaming, the need for strong schema authoring and management becomes critical for rapid development and providing resiliency/availability in operations.

We'll discuss the why, what and how in regard to best practices as well as learnings over the authors past 10 years.

I'm a 30 year+ veteran in IT focusing on data and data applications in industries such as retail, med-tech, manufacturing and public sector. Not a paper-architect, but focused on driving arch/infra data solutions to assist in the delivery of high-value, high-volume solutions.

Iverson Center for Faith (ICF) C

In this session, we will share our tried-and-true playbook for hosting an internal day of learning. This approach offers an opportunity to spread the wealth after attending a conference and can generate increased pride across your teams. Imagine taking all those professional development ideas and being able to share, influence, and grow back at your organization!

We will walk you through our 10-year journey in which we honed a playbook for hosting our internal learning day, and how we’ve been able to leverage the platform created to drive engagement in our learning culture. You will hear the end-to-end decisions you need to make to create your own learning day. You will get the planning, speaker development, logistics, and technology implementation tips you need to host a tailor-made learning event for your team. We will share our full-on marketing approach too- stickers, logos, the whole package to create that buzz of excitement! We will also highlight our internal speaker development program, so you can begin to grow your own external speakers who can share and represent your company.

Annie Greenawalt has over 15 years of experience in facilitation, instructional design, and developing blended learning strategies for non-profit, healthcare, and technology-focused organizations. She currently leads the Technology Learning Services team at SPS Commerce. Annie loves learning culture and is constantly on the lookout for innovative ways to incorporate her learners on the journey to a solution that integrates emerging technologies while staying true to the basics. She joins Megan as one of the key organizers for TechJam, the internal learning event at SPS Commerce, and as a member of the Women in Tech steering committee.
Megan Tischler is a Continuous Improvement Manager on the Technology team at SPS Commerce. Her keen eye for process improvement has led to many wins for her teammates. She has been one of the key organizers for TechJam, the SPS internal learning event since its inception. She is a member of the SPS Women in Tech steering committee and supports other community efforts like Tech Guilds, and internship and mentoring programs.

2:00 to 2:40

Anderson Student Center (ASC) A

In this session, we will see how Technology is changing the medical diagnostic industry especially after the pandemic. Few telemedicine platforms are using a virtual triaging engine for checking symptoms, then using AI to diagnose and create treatment options for providers. This session will explore how virtuwell, a leading telemedicine platform from St. Paul, is deploying predictive analytics to reduce bottlenecks and improve patient flow and patient-specific needs. We will share our journey of how we handled the patient needs during the initial stages of pandemic when most regular clinics were not available. We will cover how we Infused our platform with machine learning algorithms to be better at triaging on not only acute conditions but also on chronic conditions by integrating at home medical kit results.

Senthil Kumaran is currently serving as CIO for Virtuwell, a HealthPartners company. He is a pragmatic leader, architect, designer and developer in Web and Mobile technology in developing Internet, e-commerce, and multi-tier client-server applications including healthcare, highly secure financial applications, manufacturing, retail, and consumer websites. He is part of HealthPartners AI and Machine Learning and Enterprise architecture group and a key contributor to the HIPPA/HITEC security and a conference presenter on Predictive Data Analytics, Rules, and Web/Mobile initiatives. He is passionate about investing in both stocks and real estate and spends a lot of time analyzing cricket matches around the world. He received his MBA from St Thomas University, Minneapolis and Masters in Electronics Engineering from Bharathiar University, India.

Anderson Student Center (ASC) C

Commerce "platforms" have been on the market since around 1994. Over the decades, eCommerce has grown from a channel off to the side to being the primary system of generating revenue, both in-store and through digital channels. The market has dramatically changed over the decades and in this talk we'll cover those changes, what the market looks like today, and what the "end state" of the market is shaping up to look like.

Kelly Goetsch is Chief Strategy Officer at commercetools. He came to commercetools six years ago from Oracle, where he led product management for their microservices initiatives. Before that, he was an architect with ATG. He is the author of four books - GraphQL for Modern Commerce (O'Reilly, 2020), APIs for Modern Commerce (O'Reilly, 2017), Microservices for Modern Commerce (O'Reilly, 2016) and E-Commerce in the Cloud (O'Reilly, 2014). He is also co-founder and chairman of the MACH Alliance, a consortium of 60 ISVs and SIs dedicated to making Microservices, APIs, Cloud and Headless the default in enterprise digital experience. He holds a bachelor's degree in entrepreneurship and a master's degree in management information systems, both from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He holds three patents, including one key to distributed computing.

Anderson Student Center (ASC) C

GraphQL exposes application data as a graph which can introduce challenges if your backend isn’t graph-ready (think slow JOINs as a result of nested GraphQL queries and the dreaded n+1 query problem). The Neo4j GraphQL library enables developers to build GraphQL APIs backed by a native graph database using only GraphQL type definitions.

William Lyon is a Developer Relations Engineer at Neo4j where he helps developers be successful with graphs. Prior to joining Neo4j William worked as a software developer for several startups, building mobile apps, quantitative finance tools, and predictive API services. William holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Montana and is the author of the book "Full Stack GraphQL" published by Manning. You can find him online at lyonwj.com.

Anderson Student Center (ASC) Scooters

We all know that data intensive applications have had explosive growth in the past decade. Data now drives significant portions of our lives, from making sense of IoT swarm data to detecting fraudulent transactions at your bank. As software developers, we all have unprecedented opportunities to build data applications that generate value from these massive datasets, but where do you even start?vJoin me for this talk as we:

* introduce data intensive applications. What are they? What do they look like? Why are they important?
* explore application architectures of some popular data-intensive applications (Twitter, financial transactions, etc.) build a data-intensive application from scratch using only SQL.
* discuss the future of data in software development.

This talk is for application developers, data scientists, and of all skill levels and backgrounds and will serve as an introduction to building scalable data intensive applications.

Joe Karlsson (He/They) is a Database Engineer turned Developer Advocate (and massive data nerd) currently working at [SingleStore](https://www.singlestore.com/). He empowers developers to think creatively when building applications with a massive amount of data, through demos, blogs, videos, or whatever else developers need. Joe's career has taken him from building out database best practices and demos for MongoDB, architecting and building one largest eCommerce websites in North America at Best Buy, and teaching at one of the most highly-rated software development boot camps on Earth. Joe is also a TEDx Speaker, film buff, and avid [TikToker](https://twitter.com/JoeKarlsson1) and [Tweeter](https://twitter.com/JoeKarlsson1).

Iverson Center for Faith (ICF) A

As an incubator for innovation in air travel, Aruba has chosen to use verifiable digital credentials to manage entry requirements and health testing for travel to the island. This decentralized, open-source technology, which provides secure authentication while preserving traveler privacy, was developed by SITA and Indicio.tech and donated to Linux Foundation Public Health as Cardea. In this session, we will discuss why they chose a decentralized approach, how they created a trusted data ecosystem, and why the ability to verify personal data without having to check in with the source of that data will transform air travel, healthcare, and tourism.

Sam Curren is Indicio’s Senior Systems Architect and works on both open source and customer projects. He has been involved in the Identity Community for over 12 years, working and researching on personal data, distributed systems, supply chain digital birth certificates, and Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs). He is a co-chair of both the Hyperledger Aries project and the DIF DIDComm Working Group, and is also a member of the Decentralized Identity Foundation Steering Committee. Sam has a Masters Degree in Computer Science from Brigham Young University.

Iverson Center for Faith (ICF) B

Though the security industry has historically leveraged fewer open source SIEMs, there are several proponents to using open source tools: lower license costs, greater extensibility, greater transparency into the product, etc. In this talk, we will present how Cargill was able to implement a Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM) using open source tools like Logstash and OpenSearch.

Cargill also contributes to the open source SIEM community through the OpenSIEM-Logstash Parsing project. This project aims to ease the burden among SIEM administrators and security professionals to standardize and enrich the wide variety of logs common for security and operations. We will cover the approach to the OpenSIEM project, the tools and their uses, as well as the on-going effort to share and establish common schemas and log enrichments.

SME and Lead for Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM) at Cargill Inc. Brian has over 25 years in Cybersecurity and Cybersecurity Analytics. In his current role, his team solely focuses on SIEM and Advanced Cybersecurity Analytics.
Kyle Davis is the Senior Developer Advocate with OpenSearch at AWS. Kyle has a long history with software development and databases and has published on the subject of NoSQL and microservices architecture. When not working, Kyle enjoys 3D printing, and getting his hand dirty in his Edmonton, Alberta-based home garden.
Erin Verbeck-Lane is a Cloud Security Engineer and finds speaker biographies incredibly challenging to write, preferring to showcase her humor and wit in-person over accolades on paper. Prior to Tanium, her work at Cargill was her first sizeable contribution to the open source community, and she looks forward to digging in deeper as her career and knowledge progresses.

Iverson Center for Faith (ICF) C

While everyone likes to share successes, let’s discuss the reality of software development. Projects are messy with lots of competing interests and challenges. One of these challenges that comes up often is scope creep. As software developers, we can be pulled in many different directions to not only help make the best product that we can but stay focused on the scope of what’s expected. Sometimes your job feels like: “Damned If I Do, Damned If I Don’t”. Let’s discuss the reality of the situation and some techniques and tools to help.

Session Outline:

1. Introduction: Some projects & experiences with scope creep I’ve had as a developer

2. Scope Creep: who are the guilty parties, what are the signs, why it happens, and when it's most likely

3. Solutions: Tips/tricks to help if you are in this situation -- Ideas on how to help avoid scope creep in the future -- Reach out and let me know if they work!

4. Q&A

Hi! I'm Justin Grammens. I'm a lifelong learner, passionate about Emerging Technologies such as the Internet of Things and Machine Learning, and driven by giving back to the community and helping those advance in their career. I'm the Founder and CEO of Lab651 and Recursive Awesome. At both companies, we specialize in helping our customers succeed by bringing the best software and product development talent and process to their organization. The Lab651 team has deep expertise in mobile (native iOS and Android), web (Ruby on Rails & React), and cloud (AWS, Azure, Google) while Recursive Awesome focus is on Data Engineering & Machine Learning (Tensorflow & PyTorch). We take on and solve the hardest challenges you have! I am the creator, producer, and host of the AppliedAI Podcast (https://podcast.appliedai.mn) which allows me to interview some of the world's leading experts on Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning and am a co-founder of the 501(c)(3) non-profit Emerging Technologies North ( https://emtechnorth.org ), AppliedAI Meetup ( https://appliedai.mn ) and an Adjunct Professor teaching graduate-level classes at the University of Saint Thomas. Most importantly, I'm blessed to have a loving wife and two amazing boys who are the light of my life and keep me strong and centered. Let's connect! I would love to help you however I can.

3:00 to 3:40

Anderson Student Center (ASC) A

Over the last 3 years, Target has embarked on a journey to completely modernize our footprint of over 60,000 guest facing devices using a flexible open-source framework. Come hear Rick Walstrom and Principal Engineer Adam Nawrocki talk through Target's in-store open source journey that has allowed for increased speed of deployment, reduced configuration drift, and drastically decreased operational cost.
Topics to include:
- How Target threw down the open-source / commodity hardware gauntlet in front of some of the world's largest technology providers
- Design principles for our environment
- How we've applied open-source solutions at every stage of deployment
- The challenge of embracing large scale change in the face of decades of technical debt
- Immutability on bare metal hardware
- OS choice, Image management, and Hardware abstraction at massive scale and in a highly distributed environment
- Architecting for security
- The huge benefits we've seen in our shift from Windows to an open source OS

Rick is currently the Director of Guest Facing Device Engineering at Target and is responsible for the hardware, OS, and abstraction layer that powers more than 60,000 devices in over 1900 locations nationwide. Over the last 3 years Rick has led an initiative to modernize the way we deploy, manage, and interact with Target's end user hardware in order to create flexible and innovative experiences in-store.
Adam is a Principle Engineer at Target with a focus on 60,000 Guest Facing Devices and hundreds of thousands of connected peripherals at 1900 Target Stores. With a focus on creating delightful Guest and Team Member experiences in Target Stores, Adam has provided innovative thought leadership in the infra space that powers the Guest Experience in Target Stores leveraging open source software, commoditized hardware, and modern agile practices.

Anderson Student Center (ASC) B

The role of APIs in the enterprise continues to grow. We see rapid API adoption across many new use cases, causing engineers to think about APIs in new ways. In the enterprise, our engineering demands are complex. We have high standards for security, discoverability, and governance. There’s a high demand for creating more microservices, requiring us to have a strategy to address issues related to API consistency and composition. Modern software development methodologies like continuous development and agile help shorten the lead times to develop and release software. But that can result in more fragmentation and overall complexity. Too many microservices, not well organized.

This talk will introduce a Decentralized Emerging Architecture Approach (or a cell-based architecture) that can help improve your design patterns for building microservices in an organized manner. The cell-based architecture is based on our experience across hundreds of internal API projects. We propose this architecture to help address the challenges microservice API developers will face at scale. This forward-looking approach also helps enhance engineering agility.

Poonam Garg is an engineering leader and women in technology advocate working as Vice President at U.S Bank. Poonam has spearheaded cultural transformation around DevOps at U.S. Bank through an agile and collaborative approach ("change mindset") to software development. Poonam leads the technical transformation by assisting engineering adopting industry best practices and cloud ready solutions. Currently, Poonam leading an effort to enable engineering productivity. Poonam coached and mentored 50+ teams on re-architecting mainframe, DevOps tools and immersing DevSecOps into Agile software development practices. She is an active member of Women in Technology networks within and outside of the bank. She speaks at many tech industry events.

Anderson Student Center (ASC) C

Open source software continues to grow and expand, we see more open source and more contributions to open source projects every day. 76% of organizations increased the use of open source in the last 12 months, 37% increased the use of open source significantly. This is one of many research findings revealed in the latest OpenLogic by Perforce and the Open Source Initiative (OSI) collaboration, where over 2,600 industry professionals responded to the 2022 State of Open Source Software survey.

What open source technologies are the most used today? What are industry professionals looking for to select open source software? What are the technical challenges for organizations using open source technologies? Join us to cover the full survey report results, where you are going to learn about the latest trends in today’s popular open source software as well as the challenges and realities with the most popular open source in the world.

Today, the top reason to select open source software in organizations is to gain access to innovation and the latest technologies. The global survey results provide an instant snapshot of what is happening in every open source category, from infrastructure and programming languages to data technologies and DevOps tooling, all bringing major benefits to organizations in every industry.

And finally, get a glance at where organizations are in terms of the level of maturity using open source, and their technology strategy today and in the upcoming years.

Passionate about technology and open-source software, Javier is Chief Evangelist for Perforce Software. Responsible for technical thought leadership and advocacy for the open-source and API management portfolios. Prior to Perforce, Javier led the open-source program strategy for the IBM Z & LinuxONE platforms at IBM. Javier has been in the application development, open-source, cloud, app security, AI, SaaS, and mobile industries for 20+ years. From leading product strategy in the open-source security space at Veracode to product management for Axway's successful Appcelerator open-source offering, and at Red Hat via startup acquisition as Director of Product Management driving the OpenShift-based Mobile Application Platform. Speaker and blogger, Javier has had the opportunity to speak at industry events all over the world. Javier holds an honors degree in Computer Systems and an MBA.

Anderson Student Center (ASC) Scooters

Beer brewing can be fun, but combining brewing with IoT device hacking is even funner. It is possible to connect and collect data about almost anything, including the fermentation process inside a closed fermenter using open source technologies. In this presentation, the speaker will introduce basic concepts of IoT devices, how to collect the data efficiently and how to use JavaScript to extract and manipulate that same data into a React front-end. And if you’re new to beer brewing, don’t worry; you will also learn a thing or two about that as well!

Joel Lord (@joel__lord on Twitter) is passionate about the web and technology in general. He likes to learn new things, but most of all, he wants to share his discoveries. He does so by travelling at various conferences all across the globe. He graduated from college in computer programming in the last millennium. Apart from a little break to get his BSc in computational astrophysics, he was always in the industry. In his daily job, Joel is a developer advocate with MongoDB, where he connects with software engineers to help them make the web better by using best practices in web development. During his free time, he can be found stargazing on a campground somewhere or brewing a fresh batch of beer in his garage.

Iverson Center for Faith (ICF) A

Let's face it: most people talking about observability all end up talking about distributed tracing somehow. It is a technology that radically changes how we identify and solve technical problems. In a world where virtually all applications are born distributed — it seems to be something that you ought to know in more detail.

This talk will provide a pragmatic overview of distributed tracing by clearly articulating its motivation, problems it solves, the challenges, and what technologies you should use to ensure a vendor-agnostic implementation.

It will discuss things like white-box and black-box instrumentation, the pros and cons of each approach, and why most developers prefer one versus the other.

Ricardo is Senior Developer Advocate at AWS, working in the developer relations team for North America. With +20 years of experience, he may have learned a thing or two about distributed systems, fast data analytics, software architecture, databases, and observability. Before joining AWS, he worked for software vendors like Elastic, Confluent, and Oracle. Ricardo is known for his natural ability to explain complex topics. He craftily breaks them down into bite-sized pieces until anyone can understand. While not working, he loves barbecuing in his backyard with his family and friends, where he finally gets the chance to talk about anything unrelated to computers. He currently lives in North Carolina, USA, with his wife and son. Follow Ricardo on Twitter: @riferrei.

Iverson Center for Faith (ICF) B

The minimum viable security (MVS) approach, enables us to easily bake security into our config files, apps, and CI/CD processes with a few simple controls built - and the great part? It’s easily achievable through open source tooling.

In this talk we will focus on five critical security controls that will be integrated as part of the CI/CD pipeline by leveraging some excellent open source tools, including: Bandit or SEMGrep for static application security (SAST), Gitleaks to detect hard-coded or insufficiently secured secrets & dependency checks (SCA), KICS for infrastructure as code (IaC) and OWASP’s ZAP for API and dynamic application security (DAST), in addition to custom controls to ensure proper enforcement of MFA via Github Security. These controls will provide a foundational framework for securing your applications from the first line of code, that will make it possible to continuously iterate and evolve your security maturity all the way through advanced layers of security that comes with time, as well as increased experience with your deployments, stacks, and security posture.

Code examples & demos will be showcased as part of this session.

Currently CTO and Co-Founder of Jit, the Continuous Security platform for Developers. David has a PhD in Bioinformatics and for the past 20 years has been a full-stack developer, CTO & technical evangelist, mostly in the cloud, and specifically in cloud security, working for leading organizations such as MyHeritage, CloudLock (acquired by Cisco) and leading the 'advanced development team' for the CTO of Cisco's cloud security (a $500M ARR BU).

Iverson Center for Faith (ICF) C

This session will be a moderated panel discussion around the experience of people who have traditionally not been represented in tech, particularly within the Open Source Software community. We will discuss the overall idea that OSS increases accessibility for people of all backgrounds to engage with tech, as well as the idea that Women, BIPOC, and people living with disabilities have felt excluded from the OSS community. Valerie will be joined by panelists Casie Siekman, Jenn Bonine, and Destiny Babjack. We will invite a variety of people to engage in the discussion and also leave time for Q+A and attendee input.

Valerie Lockhart is a creative technologist and Executive Director for Code Savvy, a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing access to computer science education for people of all backgrounds. She is also an advocate for the free and open sharing of information and collaborative creation of technology and media.

3:50 - Prizes & Giveaways

4:00 to 6:00 - Happy Hour